100 Days To Launch Your Practice – Summer 2024

Lesson 1: Welcome and Orientation
Let’s set the stage for your self-guided journey through our 100 Days program. This Orientation is important! It will take you less than 5 minutes and will improve your results and understanding.

Lesson 2: Setting the Stage for You and Your New Practice
There are three parts to this lesson as we orient your thinking about health and patient advocacy, what it is, where it came from, how it’s different from what the rest of the healthcare system offers, and what your success will be based on, too.

Lesson 3: Setting Your Goals
As Yogi Berra said, “If you don’t know where you’re going, you’ll wind up someplace else!” 😊 So let’s work on some goal setting – with guidance.

Lesson 4: Early Decisions
It’s time to begin making some of the early basic decisions you’ll need for your practice. We’ll determine what those important decisions are, provide some basic info about them, then let you use your resources to make them.

Lesson 5: Advocacy Ethics
Now, with your early decisions behind you, it’s time to delve into one of the most important aspects of advocacy as a profession – the ethics of advocacy. A clear understanding of our ethics will help you better make the decisions and plans you’ll need as you move forward.

Lesson 6: Financial Basics
Everyone’s favorite topic – finances! … the tough, probably kinda boring, but essential background you’ll need to set yourself up in a successful business. This is an area many of you have told us you felt unsure about, so this is the time to make them easier to understand – and use.

Lesson 7: Setting Your Prices
Perhaps the question most often asked by potential advocates regards how much money they can expect to make as independent advocates. The answer is, of course, “it depends.” So that’s what we’ll tackle with this lesson… filling in the blanks on those dependencies, and managing your expectations about what kind of living you can make with an independent practice.

Lesson 8: Insurance for Your Practice
Professionals of all types know that to protect themselves and their practices, they need to be covered by liability insurance, also sometimes called Errors & Omissions Insurance (E&O). There are specific circumstances you must be aware of, plus terminology, and insurance company practices you’ll need to understand to be sure you get the right insurance for the best price.

Lesson 9: Legal Needs and Considerations
There are many legal considerations any business owner, including independent advocacy practice owners, must understand. From contracts to business formation, we’ll do a brief overview of them here.

Lesson 10: Introduction to Client Acquisition
The client acquisition process is two big steps – first, marketing to entice them to contact you, then second, “selling” them – to convince them to hire you and pay you. We’re going to look at them backwards, because when you understand what works to convince them to hire you (sign your contract), then you’ll better understand why marketing works the way it does.

Lesson 11: Client Assessments & Estimates
Once you’ve engaged a potential client on the phone, it’s time to get down to business to deliver what you’ve promised. Your next step will be developing a plan and an assessment, then producing an estimate.

Lesson 12: Client Acquisition – Getting Started with Marketing
“So now that we understand the process of Client Acquisition, it should make the first step – marketing – easier to understand. The first step answers the question: How will this new client even know to reach out to me?

That’s marketing – creating the possibility that those who need you will know you are available to help, how you can help them, and how to reach out to you. When you do the marketing step effectively, then the “sales” part (Step 2) is so much easier and happens so much more often!”

Lesson 13: Target Audiences, Messaging, and Choosing a Niche
Lesson 13 will continue with the very basics of marketing. We will focus on developing a niche, choosing your target audiences (which you’ll do for a niche, if you have one) and formulating messages for those audiences (to compel them to contract with you).

Lesson 14: Branding, Elevator Pitches, and Narratives (Marketing)
“You probably think you know what a brand is – and if you recognize one then – well – you know PART of the story. This lesson on branding always surprises students because a brand may NOT be what you think it is! At least not in full.

Elevator Pitches and Narratives are additional identity tools, and are built by you to help you respond to those folks who ask you what you do for a living. They are tools that make it very easy for us to respond to questions about our profession and our work, and help folks take notice, so they remember to call us when they need our help.”

Lesson 15: Overcoming Objections (Marketing, Messaging)
In this lesson, we’ll look at a variety of objections, and learn how to overcome them. Done right, this will also make those folks who raised objections become your biggest supporters!

Lesson 16: Intro to Web Marketing and SEO
This lesson is a deep dive into what needs to be included in an advocate’s website to be sure potential clients find the information they seek, and to be sure Google and other search engines treat you favorably. “Favorably” refers to SEO – Search Engine Optimization – which, when done well, puts you at the top of the list of search results.

Lesson 17: Newsletters and Email Collection
Now that you’ve got a better understanding of web marketing, your website, and SEO, it’s time to think about expanding your use of the web for other forms of outreach, too. This lesson will cover collecting email addresses (potential clients!), and then using an e-newsletter as an inexpensive and effective form of marketing.

Lesson 18: Blogging and Social Media
Two more vitally important web marketing tactics for advocates: blogging and social media are covered in this lesson. Plus we’ll look at a few simple (and not-so-simple) additional web tactics to use, too.

Lessons 19 and 20: Becoming the Expert / Using Public Relations
This lesson will make the case for becoming an expert; going public with your expertise. Why it’s worthwhile, and how to do it, including getting started with public relations: what that is, and the easiest ways to use it. We’ll also be setting the stage for public speaking (which will be covered in our next lesson.)

Lesson 21: Public Speaking
Now that you understand why becoming known as an expert is a good tool for your client acquisition, and how to use PR to gain some expert-reputation traction, let’s look at public speaking as one of THE most important tactics for meeting that goal, and why it’s so powerful for your marketing efforts.

Lesson 22: Choosing the Right Marketing Tactics and Measuring Marketing Success
We’ve covered the gamut of effective forms of marketing for our target audiences; how best to deliver the important messages that will compel them to engage with us. Now it’s time to figure out which tactic will work for which niche or scenario, including how to measure how successful our marketing has been.

Lesson 23: Workflow
This lesson focuses on workflow – what happens first, then next, then next, through every aspect of your practice? What steps will you take while you are on the phone with a potential client? What steps will you take when someone is ready to sign their agreement with you? Do those steps need to take place in a specific order? Or are they more like a checklist of things to do? This lesson will teach you how to create your own tools for managing your workflow, YOUR way, for YOUR practice.

Lesson 24: Best Practices
It’s time to begin pulling together all the aspects of advocacy practice we’ve learned about in this 100 Days to Launch program. This lesson will wrap it all up by reviewing the best practices for all business aspects of your practice.

Lesson 25 (Last Lesson!) Let’s Launch!
For this, our last lesson, we’re tying up some important loose ends, evaluating the program and your experience, and making sure you have the resources you need to get launched.